Where Are The Wise Men?

I’m on another business trip, so it’s time for another review of some find talks from IT Conversations.

Paul Graham never disappoints and his OSCON 2005 talk is pure Graham.  He claims that businesses were the most productive when they were startups and that, since people are more productive when they [...]

If you want a good way to insure your survival in your current position, read Rands In Repose: The Insiders.

I’ve alway tried to get along with our admin assistants (some have been good, some have been bad) but not for the reasons Rands supposes — I feel they get dumped on and they do a [...]

Britain, Here’s an example of how your past could catch up with you.

Many don’t think of those little cards you have to scan at the supermarket to be any big deal. This gives you an idea of what kind of data they keep track of — and for how long.

There are very few times when I find a utility that may just change my life — and I think I just found one.

Like many of you reading this, I have many passwords to keep track of. Whether it’s for banking or just a throw-away site, having different passwords is important. I used to [...]

This is just to spread the word, since I’ve only seen it on a couple of blogs. I’ve been using rc2 and it’s been wonderful — huge improvements over OOo 1.1, Go get it now or, better yet, spread the love and use BitTorrent.

I don’t usually do product “reviews” but this one is especially good.

My daughter likes to watch DVD’s and, in the process of opening up the case or getting them from the DVD player, she tends to scratch them a bit. One of her favorites was scratched so bad that it would skip a lot [...]

I have to use a laptop on a trip I’m taking in a couple of weeks and I don’t have a spare network connection in my cube so I can get it ready. This hasn’t been a problem in the past, and TightVNC was still install from the last time I used this laptop.

So [...]

My manager said that, since my title is “QA Engineer” I need to do more with automated testing now that we have someone trained up to do the bulk of the customer support. Hence the new category called “testing”. Expect more here in the near future (like today, or tomorrow.

Not much time for the long post that this deserves, but here is an example of using Jython, zxJDBC, and DBUnit. This little snippet makes a JDBC connection to a JDBC database and gets all the data out of it and stores it in an XML file

from com.ziclix.python.sql import zxJDBC from org.dbunit.database import DatabaseConnection from [...]

Matt’s post has reminded me that I need to blog about my Google Reader experience.

I’ve only had one complaint about Bloglines — that I have to use my mouse all the time. I gave Google Reader a shot to see what it was like.

The import took awhile, though my opml only has !75 [...]